IRS-targeted groups cry foul after playing GOP politics

The conservative groups testifying about overzealous IRS scrutiny during a House Ways and Means Committee hearing Tuesday can’t get around a simple fact: All have been involved in the kinds of political activity that’s ripe for red flags.

Simple searches on Google, Facebook, Twitter and other news engines point to plenty of political activities that are the essence of what the IRS looks for when deciding who gets an exemption from Uncle Sam.

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The group leaders attended rallies to stop Obama administration priorities and ripped into the president’s work on health care and missile defense. They spoke openly about defeating President Barack Obama in the 2012 election. They pushed for winners in state and local election races.

Their activities might not have run afoul of the rules. But for the murky world of charitable exemptions now under heightened political scrutiny, their backgrounds underscore the gray area the IRS was in as it posed questions to the groups.

“Certainly, one of the IRS’s responsibilities is to wring out the ambiguity as much as possible in order to ascertain what the organization is going to do, and then make not necessarily the easy call of whether the political activity is less than a primary activity,” said Marcus Owens, the head of the IRS’s exempt organizations division from 1990 to 2000.

The IRS is in a bind when it comes to the regulation of nonprofit groups. Agency regulation prohibits nonprofits from primarily engaging in political activity but offers no public guidance to judge what unacceptable behavior means.

The groups argue that while they might have engaged in political debates, they weren’t primarily political organizations, which would have made them ineligible for the special tax status.

Sue Martinek, president of the Coalition for Life of Iowa, complained during yesterday’s hearing that the IRS wanted a guarantee that her group would not “bother” Planned Parenthood. According to the group’s website, it holds twice-a-week prayer sessions outside the women’s clinic in Cedar Rapids. It also participates monthly in meetings of the Iowa PAC for Life and annually in the Protest the Pill day against birth control.

In an interview with POLITICO after the hearing, Martinek said her group did not meet with PACs and engaged in no political activity.

“We have done no political activity,” she said. “We did not meet with PACs.”

In her testimony, Diane Belsom, the president of the Laurens County Tea Party in South Carolina, described more than two years of back-and-forth with the IRS as she sought 501(c)(4) tax-exempt status.

“It is totally unacceptable,” Belsom told committee members. “The IRS needs to be fully investigated and be held accountable for its incompetence and harassment of conservative groups.”

But throughout her time waiting, her group was deeply immersed in local, state and national political battles, including a pro-Second Amendment rally at a local movie theater on Monday with state lawmakers.

“We want to show our support for the Second Amendment by gathering together like-minded Americans to send a clear message to our state and federal government that we will NOT be disarmed,” the Laurens County Tea Party said in a press release announcing the event.

On Belsom’s website, there is a section dedicated to “Help Stop Obamacare.” It includes a list of eight “free market health care reforms” and a link to a Heritage Foundation blog attacking the law. Her Twitter account touts travels in January to a Columbia, S.C., rally against the health care law.